Rhythmic structure in music A study of the perception of metrical and phrase structure, from a mechanistic viewpoint

TL;DRAbstract

The thesis investigates the perception of musical metre and phrasing, which together form a hierarchical rhythmic structure, represented in tree-diagram form. Rather than study human perceptual processes, a mechanistic approach is adopted. It is shown that the most likely rhythmic structure of a passage can be generated largely from the pitch and durational information in scores, through the perception of certain features, termed structural characteristics, supported by some general perceptual preferences. Each characteristic is itself a perceptual preference, capable of selecting certain groupings of notes or chords as phrase groupings or highlighting particular temporally disjunct notes or chords as structural accents, each of which is a potential metrical accent. Mental connections between relatively long notes, a preference for regular metre, and the grouping of relatively close attacks establish a basic (if sometimes ambiguous) rhythmic structure, which may be modified or develope

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